Sermon given by Clare Fortune-Lad, August 18, 2024.
Most Tuesday mornings, I try to start my day at Quaker Meeting. I log onto Zoom and sit in the quiet with about 75 other people, breathing in, and breathing out. Sometimes my camera is on, and sometimes my camera is off. Sometimes my eyes are closed, and sometimes my gaze is just soft, looking out at the trees or at my impossibly stripey cat.
Sometimes people offer what is called “Verbal Ministry,” a sentence or two that they feel moved to share with the group. Sometimes the silence holds us all in holy, cozy rest. After 30 minutes, I hop to it and start my day, always feeling like the edges are a little softer on whatever is coming next.
I discovered Quaker Meeting during my 3-month sabbatical from UUCH this winter. I was fortunate to spend a few days on silent retreat at Pendle Hill, a Quaker Center outside of Philadelphia. It was during a magical week in early April when the trees and bushes around here are still pretty dormant, but traveling even just as far south as Pennsylvania was a floral revelation.
My plan was to see dear friends from college on Friday night, and then head to my dorm room at Pendle Hill on Saturday afternoon. I switched my phone onto airplane mode, gave my family the kind front desk coordinator’s phone number, and donned two name tags. One read “Clare (she/her)” and the other, which had been worn by many before me, read “Observing Silence.” I would remain in my quiet nest of solitude until Monday morning: walking, meditating, reading, napping, writing, thinking, and not thinking. The campus had walking trails, a labyrinth, a candlelit dining hall, an art room, and a culture familiar with silent retreats. Passerbys smiled at me on campus sidewalks, then noticed my special name tag and didn’t try to engage me in any further conversation.
I suspected that I would love this time with myself, and lo and behold, I was correct! It had been a long winter in many ways, even though my day to day work here had been temporarily set aside. I packed many books, nervous about how I would possibly fill all the screen-free hours, and ended up devouring a book shining a playful, feminist light on Millennial Girlhood, of all things. It had jumped off my library shelf into my arms a few weeks before, appearing to be a fluffy romp through 1990s pop culture, but ended up being a deep gift to my soul.
“One in a millennial” by kate Kennedy reminded me that so much of what had been sold to me as “cool” and “feminine” during my childhood and teenage years had been simultaneously devalued as silly and stupid by our patriarchal culture. Intellectually, I knew this, but the joy in embracing my love of pink, dresses, floral prints, pop music, and camp craft projects had always been tainted by a fear that all of these would make me seem less smart. I distinctly remember loving the Babysitter’s Little Sister Chapter Books as a third grader, but being admonished by Mrs. Straight that the Narnia books I also liked were a “much better fit” for a “girl as smart as” me. It was a balm to my soul to read this memoir-style analysis of the cultural zeitgeist I grew up in, written by an ironic woman born the very same year as me. Her writing helped me feel like someone was wrapping me in a blanket and whispering “It’s okay to like what you like. Blasting Hanson with your windows rolled down adds joy to our universe and it does not make you shallow, basic, or dumb.”
If you know me at all, you might suspect that on my one completely unstructured day of silent retreat, I still wrote out a tentative schedule for myself by hand in my journal so I could make sure to fit in everything I wanted to do. After breakfast and a stroll through the labyrinth, I walked the perimeter trail featuring a verdant pond, bamboo clusters, and a massive European Beech tree dating back to the 1600s. Then lunch outside and a nap, and a trip to the Art Building.
If you know me even better, you will not be surprised to hear that I pretty much followed my little schedule, because you can keep time fairly well just by the ringing of the meal bells and the height of the sun.
That trip to the art building, though planned, still felt like an act of bravery for me. My life’s journey with perfectionism has always made me feel like I was irrevocably “bad” at things like drawing and painting. This feeling exists, of course, side by side with my fierce belief that as an educator, I must view all of us as artists and remember that it’s the process, not the product that matters. 8 summers ago, in fact, when I sat in our Parlor with several of you, interviewing for this Director of Religious Education position, I felt the need to offer the disclaimer that I wasn’t really very crafty. Thank you, by the way, for hiring me anyway. That April day at Pendle Hill when I walked into the art building, I also tried to remind myself that I come from a legacy of ancestors who found a love of painting later in life (my grandfather, and then after he passed, my grandmother, and now their eldest child, my mother). So I let myself be open to the possibility of finding quiet and pleasure with some art supplies that afternoon, unsure of what I would be drawn to or whether i would be “good” at it.
Primed by the delightful book I was reading, with my psyche floating somewhere between age 8 and 12, I was excited to find some DMC embroidery floss, a clipboard, and some scissors. I hadn’t made a friendship bracelet in probably 25 years, but my hands remembered exactly how to start the project, knot the strings, and transfer a pattern from my mind onto the thread. It made my heart sing, and I still wear that simple creation on my left wrist to remind me of the peace I found within my quiet self at Pendle Hill.
Returning home, and to work here at UUCH, I’ve carried the thread of tying knots into colorful patterns along with me. I made a few more from memory while sitting on Zoom meetings or watching my kids play, and then I found an online PDF of the same Klutz Brand book I learned on (Copyright 1996 by Laura Torres) and started getting bolder with what designs I would try. Turns out, my confidence has continued to skyrocket since my days of attending 4 H Camp in Lincolnville, ME, and now I am proud to announce that your not-crafty DRE can make almost every pattern in the book. I like how it makes me slow down and use both of my hands. When I’m tying the knots, I can’t check my phone or multitask beyond maybe talking to a loved one or watching a little tv. Making bracelets reminds me to stop double screening (that is, checking my phone while I watch a show or attend a zoom meeting), which I’ve noticed can really stress me out.
Another beautiful epiphany I had while on sabbatical was how full my life is. I think I had been moving so fast for so long that it took slowing way down to realize how much I needed to just be still. There’s such a gravity in today’s world pushing us to make more friends and buy more things and have more hobbies and do more good deeds and increase increase increase, right? I noticed that saying no more felt really good, and restful, and right for me at this time in my life. Sabbatical was a start, and as I’ve come back into the regular day-to-day, I still try to ask myself if hanging out with xyz person feeds my soul, or is it just something I feel I “should” be doing? I try to discern what I really need in my day and week, and let go of all the other noise. I try to give myself grace and remember that there isn’t some Wonder Woman badge waiting for me at my kids’ high school graduation for juggling eight hundred noble pursuits on top of the “have-tos” like groceries and bathtime. Maybe this sounds like basic stuff to you, or maybe it sounds like total anathema. Either way, I continue to walk on a journey of challenging my people-pleasing, rule-following, codependent tendencies in ways that preserve my inner stillness. And if you’re on this journey, too, I see you and I quietly wave hello in your direction.
Pausing my instagram and facebook use was a special revelation over the winter, too. These ways of connecting have been such good pals to me at other times in my life, especially keeping me connected and laughing during Covid lockdowns and newly postpartum life. But more recently, I’ve been feeling the pull of how monetized I’ve become online. For example, so much of the “mom of young kids” world online is trying to show me how much better I could be phrasing things or structuring my home…and wouldn’t I consider spending $39.99 to buy their course on “winning” at this stage of parenthood?
Scrolling through a lot of that was fueling my desperation to find the right book on child development or the revolutionary framework for parenting that would make my days with my little guys full of calming craft projects and colorful meals. It was like spell I knew I had to break, but it’s just so darn fun to scroll, too, right? Until it isn’t. Taking three months off social media while my children sprinted around the house screaming nonsense words and eating a lot of mac and cheese was the reset I needed. I was able to remember that I’m a great mom, just the way I am. I’ve mostly given up on Instagram, but returned to facebook in a much more intentional way that feels like it honors my time and unfollows a lot of the pages and people that were making me feel like I was the worst.
Speaking of realizing how full my life already is - I missed this place a lot. I knew I really liked my job when I started the sabbatical, but I was also more than a tad burnt out and I was really looking forward to more spacious weekends. But, being gone ended up reminding me what a prominent place you all have in my life, and how this community holds me in ways I found it difficult to live without. It was a beautiful reminder that I care deeply about who you are, and what you do, and how much of a gift it truly is to be in each of your lives. I found myself thinking about Sally a lot, who had this job before me and died quite suddenly and quite young in June 2023. I could always tell how lucky she felt to be part of the UUCH universe, and the longer I stay, the more of the blessings of this community seem to multiply in my life, too.
Some weekends during sabbatical, my kids would say, “Why can’t we go back to church again yet?” or they’d beg for “Blue Boat Home” as their only lullaby for weeks on end. Margaret Mead famously wrote that if a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing they’d discover was the water. I’d been swimming in this job for so many years that I’d been taking for granted what a special place this is, what a haven it is in an often brutal world. Over the winter, I think all of us Fortune-Lads longed for the tenderness folx show one another around here in big and small ways.
Okay - back to Quaker Meeting for a minute! I had not attended this kind of worship before I went on retreat to Pendle Hill, and I’m grateful to them for opening it up virtually all over the world, every morning of the week at 8:30 am. Before sabbatical, I knew I wanted to work more time into my life to stop and focus on my breathing. I loved meditation, but felt intimidated by the word, too, because I thought I didn’t do it “right.” Like many of you, maybe, I thought it was incorrect to fall asleep in the middle of a meditation or to come out of my quiet time with a to-do list as long as my arm. During sabbatical, I just meditated a lot anyway, in my own Clare way. I was lucky to attend Restorative Yoga in a neighboring town, where we lie in different positions on a bolster for an hour and focus on “Right here, right now.” I started taking time to do nothing with my eyes open sometimes, instead of closed, if I felt extra sleepy. And, when I felt really sleepy, I had the privilege of granting myself the radical permission to take a freaking nap already!
The more I did it, the more I realized that no one meditates “correctly,” and the more you try it, the kinder you might become to yourself, too. I gave myself permission to meditate for 10 or 15 minutes some days, fighting the voice in my head saying that short spurts didn’t “count” for whatever reason. I found that regularly meditating in community is really valuable for me too, whether on the Quaker Zoom or at my neighborhood Yoga studio. I know that our Tuesday night meditation group holds this space for one another year round - and that it was a huge bright spot in our dear Terry Koukias’ life. Inspired by this group , and my dad, and others who swear by a mindfulness practice in their day-to-day, I finally let go of doing it “right.” I stopped judging myself for having to-do lists come up and started noticing the lists, and letting them float by as I filled my mind with inhales, and exhales. Sometimes I’d feel the tingly top of my head rising into space like a hot air balloon. And sometimes, when the chime on my meditation app rang I went right to my task app and jotted down the stuff I remembered. I forgave myself for not being the Buddha himself because you know what, the Buddha forgave himself for a lot of stuff too.
Let’s end with part of our reading from earlier this morning, which I came across a few weeks ago in Adam White’s first novel, narrated by a crime-investigator dad in Damariscotta, Maine. I love the way it depicts him stumbling into a quiet, contented joy, while almost not even realizing it. It’s how I want to feel on my most centered, self-actualized days, when I find the time to meditate, or tie some knots on a bracelet, or listen to one of you tell me about your life:
“I felt full of everything I ever wanted, like the place I was in may not have been the place I’d been trying to get to, but only because there was no way to find it, no way to know of it, without making several wrong turns - wrong but fortuitous - on the path to some other place.”
May we each find places where we can feel full, just as we are, right here, and right now.
Blessed Be, and Amen.